Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Tuesday October 04, 2011 @02:26PM
from the when-will-politicians-learn dept.

bs0d3 writes "Today a court in Belgium overruled an earlier judgment and ordered an ISP to block The Pirate Bay. The type of block to be used by the ISP is a simple DNS filter, which is similar to ones used before in Denmark. In Denmark the DNS block was extremely easy to circumvent, and the attention to The Pirate Bay actually increased Danish site traffic after the block. Today a hacktivist group called Telecomix, which is more recently known for helping to establish communications during the Internet blackout in Egypt, is offering their help. Their custom made 'censorship proof' DNS service is designed for situations just like this. ISP customers facing a block can simply use Telecomix's DNS server instead of the ISP-provided one to access blocked sites such as The Pirate Bay."
The Pirate Bay also has suggestions for getting around the DNS block.

It only comes down to a question of how determined your ISP/government is to block you. If the ISP's really wanted to, they could keep an active running blacklist of all of all IP's associated with Telecomix and other proxy sites (the way Websense [wikipedia.org] and other blocking software companies do). It would never be perfect, but it would be pretty damned effective for all but the most determined/informed geeks. And, even worse, if the government really wanted to, they could just keep a tally of everyone even trying to access those IP's and kick down your door one night to drag you off to a prison cell somewhere.

Fortunately, this sort of behavior is pretty uncommon in most developed countries, but don't kid yourself. If they *really* wanted to shut you up, they could. All they have to do is throw up enough obstacles and threats. And, as a last resort, they can even just pull the plug altogether (like they did [npr.org] in San Francisco during the BART protests, and in Egypt [telegraph.co.uk] during the protests there). Most ISP's cave pretty quickly when soldiers show up with rifles and tanks.

Individuals/Groups/Organisations are permitted to use encryption upto 40 bit key length in the RSA algorithms or its equivalent in other algorithms without having to obtain permission. However, if encryption equipments higher than this limit are to be deployed, individuals/groups/organisations shall do so with the permission of the Telecom Authority and deposit the decryption key, split into two parts, with the Telecom Authority

You can't even do that, because it's just software. The truly dedicated find a way to circumvent it, produce a tool which is distributed over the internet to everyone else and the censorship is avoided. In order to prevent that, you would have to stop people from communicating with each other and distributing the tool -- which you can do in theory, you can close the whole internet in theory, but in almost all cases it makes the cost for the censorship entity vastly exceed the benefit of being able to censor

Well, it just becomes an arms race. Once the tool gets popular enough that you notice it you block the tool. Then they make a new tool, then you block that. As a bonus side effect, you train the next generation of hackers.

Well, it just becomes an arms race. Once the tool gets popular enough that you notice it you block the tool. Then they make a new tool, then you block that. As a bonus side effect, you train the next generation of hackers.

It is an arms race that the censor will lose, because the hackers are perfectly capable of communicating in ways that require politically suicidal measures to prevent. Never mind simple work-arounds like P2P software that downloads digitally signed updates for a list of censored name:address mappings from arbitrary peers. You take The Pirate Bay out of the DNS, what do you do when people post the IP address for The Pirate Bay in the comments for every site that shows up on the first five pages of search res

I agree. Censorship is a society/social problem so let's discuss it as such and have it derail into technical workarounds which just steals focus for the real problem. It's kinda like the crypto discussion where nerds claim to be invincible because they are using 1024 bit AES encryption with a 512 bit password. If the government wants your "secret" information the will hit you with a rubber hose until you talk. In this case - yes you can always use a custom DNS list, VPN or a SSH proxy... but that's not the

It is certainly true that censorship is a political question rather than a technological one, but we can't forget that the technology impacts the policy discussion. Those who promote censorship will argue that keeping people from The Pirate Bay is worth the cost of breaking the DNS and impeding legitimate speech, such as the discussions of public policy and advocacy of policy positions that are presented on The Pirate Bay's blog. If the true state of things is that everyone interested in copyright infringement will be able to download a censorship work-around just as easily as they downloaded a BitTorrent client (or the work-around will come in as an automatic update to the client), but people with a casual or academic interest in the issue who are unwilling to download a legally questionable censorship work-around will be prohibited from hearing what The Pirate Bay has to say, the case for censorship completely falls apart. As they say, if you outlaw information then only outlaws will have information.

Ignoring the impact of technology ignores the futility of the policy. It makes it look like a good policy on paper when the reality is completely different.

That said, if your point is that the technology does not make the policy irrelevant, I completely agree. The fact that technology will allow anyone to circumvent the censorship does not eliminate the harms of censorship -- it breaks DNSSEC, prevents law-abiding citizens unwilling to execute a work-around from accessing a variety of non-infringing material, and it legitimizes the idea of censorship. For those reasons it must be fought as a policy matter regardless of the technology.

But technology creates a powerful policy argument that the expected benefits will not accrue while the costs accumulate, and it strengthens the argument that censorship should not be adopted as a policy.

It only comes down to a question of how determined your ISP/government is to block you.

In this case they aren't at all determined. It's just the 2 biggest ISP's (Belgacom & Telenet) who have been ordered to block TPB, not the smaller ones (yet?) and they are just blocking the DNS lookup for TPB on their own servers. It's typically belgian if you ask me : create some bs laws and rules and implicitly encourage people to get around them by making circumvention trivial.

New cable, other routes, different frequency, higher power and/or lower bitrate to get the signal even with the jammer on, PSTN line with an analog modem. There are ways to connect if you really really want it.

They do not run the tracker, actually, there is no tracker at all, tracking is decentralized and has been for a while now. What they run is a search engine for torrents, you can comment them etc. that can be replicated more easily than a tracker. Or you can even search for torrents using google.

I doubt the judge cares all that much. As long as the relevant parties follow the order most judges are pretty content, if someone else finds a work around that is not a slap as far as most are concerned.
The lawyers might be pissy though.

The net is easy to censor. Just be a government or powerful megacorporation, call up an ISP and tell them to do what you want or you'll make life miserable - that's assuming the ISP itself isn't willingly doing the censoring.

Now, darknets maintained by uber-geeks running on top of the net, are hard (or impossible) to censor.

That would depend on jurisdiction. I would love to see what would happen when DHS decides to try to take down a.CA domain name....CA is under the purvey of CIRA, which is a Canadian non-profit. For such a takedown order to have *any* teeth at all, they'd have to convince a judge that Canadian law has been broken, and that there was a case to de-register the domain name. Good luck with that, for now, because Canadian copyright law is different from American copyright law, and because even if Canadian law w

I work at a school, and I notice there is an endless stream of new web-proxy services around for the purpose of getting access to games. All ad-supported. Obnoxious things, putting everything in frames with ads around, but they do get you what you want. No use on media lockers, but they'll get you to torrent sites easily enough.

You cannot stop or prevent sociological problems with technology. At best all you can do is obfuscate it, and often that act alone increases the activity one wishes was squashed (Called Streisand Effect).

The MPAA and RIAA already do go after the mob in places like Russia, Hong Kong, etc that are the people behind the majority of the bootleg movie, music and software trade in Asia/Eurasia. They've done so for years now.

You'd think that what the local organization [defending Net Neutrality and file sharing and fighting cencorship and local MAFIAAs] has to say might interest people.

TL;DR : The Belgian Antipiracy Foundation wanted the two main ISPs to block TPB, but were not respecting the proportionality principle, using a legal procedure reserved to urgent matters, when TPB has been running for 8years.
Of course they were told to GTFO, but in appeal they won and those two ISPs now have to block 11 TPB domain names, half of them are not even running nor leading to The Pirate Bay in any way.

NURPA (Net Users' Rights Protection Association, active in Belgium and Europe to fight against ACTA for example) says it's stupid, useless, and in conflict with the European Court of Justice's decision about what, when and how filtering may be legitimate. (answer : never when it is about Intellectual Property)

And there is a link to how to set up alternatives DNS servers on windows and ubuntu in their article, long before "TPB and telecomix came and saved us with the solution to circumvent the filtering".

So yeah, The Pirate Bay rocks, Telecomix does too, but this time the credit has to go to the local net activists association who got it right in the first place.

NURPA (Net Users' Rights Protection Association, active in Belgium and Europe to fight against ACTA for example) says it's stupid, useless, and in conflict with the European Court of Justice's decision about what, when and how filtering may be legitimate. (answer : never when it is about Intellectual Property)

Never heard of them and the fact that their website is only in 1 of the 3 official languages of the country makes me suspect these are just a couple of guys in a garage somewhere.

NURPA (Net Users' Rights Protection Association, active in Belgium and Europe to fight against ACTA for example) says it's stupid, useless, and in conflict with the European Court of Justice's decision about what, when and how filtering may be legitimate. (answer : never when it is about Intellectual Property)

Never heard of them and the fact that their website is only in 1 of the 3 official languages of the country makes me suspect these are just a couple of guys in a garage somewhere.

Given that my local Belgian municipality's website is (was? not checked recently) available in 1 (French) of the 2 official languages in the region, that Belgian Rail only communicates in French, that Mobistar, MacDonald and several others only recognizes French in their stores and that everything I receive from the Belgian government is in French no-matter what, I "suspect these are just a couple of guys in a garage somewhere" - or that French in simply the lingua franca in Belgium.(note: I live in Brussel

Except you are dead wrong as about 60% of the Belgian inhabitants is Flemish (Dutch) speaking. The fact that most of them speak French when spoken to in French while it doesn't exactly go the other way around does not change the facts. It does however give a pretty good picture of what's wrong with this country and why we still have no bloody government.

I know 60-65% (depending on source) speaks Flemish - I work in Flanderen, I understand/read/partially speak dutch - Doesn't change that No Matter what I do, I have to use French when dealing with my local Municipality (Inside the larger Brussels area), government, when going to stores, when getting letters from just about anything. Fuck it, the university-hospital I went to recently had ALL signs in French, and only some in dutch.

Except you are dead wrong

No, I am not wrong: French is required if you want to live in Belgium - Even r

I know 60-65% (depending on source) speaks Flemish - I work in Flanderen, I understand/read/partially speak dutch - Doesn't change that No Matter what I do, I have to use French when dealing with my local Municipality (Inside the larger Brussels area), government, when going to stores, when getting letters from just about anything. Fuck it, the university-hospital I went to recently had ALL signs in French, and only some in dutch.

Except you are dead wrong

No, I am not wrong: French is required if you want to live in Belgium - Even registering as a foreigner in Belgium is done in French!
(Note: My observations are based on living in Brussels for half a decade; a place where French and Dutch are both legally equal, and where companies are required by law to offer their services in both languages)

French IS the Lingua Franca in Belgium, even if 60% or more speaks natively Dutch/Flemish, simply because most people knows and uses French.

I tend to refuse to speak French to any official in Brussels which has worked just fine for me, any official not offering papers or help in either Dutch or French (your choice) in the Brussels area is in violation of the law and if you wanted to you could make that a problem for them (of which they are keenly aware if you remind them). The fact that a lot of the Flemish places around Brussels have been "Francophonised" is one of the big issues why radical nationalist parties like the NVA and the Vlaams Bela

We should have a response from the EU in several years, but it won't be quite clear and opinions will be divided. Some memberstates will say "Yes", some "No", and some "Maybe". In the end Germany and France get to do a lot of posturing and the UK tries not to look too butthurt while calling the president a wet rag. The UK ends up being opposed to everything that doesn't serve its interests, but tries to get the best benefits of being part of the European Union.

I live in Belgium, and I still recall the '70, when we used to go abroad to go buy records that were illegal in Belgium, or to watch moved that didn't play over here.Seems to me we're going back to the old days.:)

I've not been on slashdot for years, since I got tired of hearing all the pseudophilosophical bullshit that was slung about in a vain attempt to justify piracy. the comments i see here range from "technological hack to serve as a workaround to break the law" to "lame speculation as to whether such blocks break the 'spirit of the EU'" to ad-hominems against the judge in question and his "tantrums" to the predictable government/corporate conspiracybabble.

nothing on slashdot ever changes, it seems. it just gets less and less relevant.

if you want to pirate and selectively respect copyright, please, by all means. go nuts. but stop trying to sugarcoat it already, he says, knowing full well that the inevitable result will be ridicule from the echo chamber.

GP was talking about blocking port 53 outbound from the ISP's network, forcing everybody to use the ISP's internal DNS servers unless they used a different port.

That's a bit kludgy... why not just silently redirect it to the ISP's own DNS server? Then most people wouldn't have a clue it was even happening, even if they'd already gone to the trouble of setting themselves up with an open DNS server.

And as soon as that starts to happen software will start having options to send DNS queries to other ports than 53, the same happened with SMTP (most providers block port 25, so my hosting provider runs their mailserver on 25 AND 2525, problem solved...)

You can certainly email your representative in the federal parlement to voice your concern however they won't be able to do anything directly since they cannot interfere with court decisions (due to the independence of the judiciary.) You could contact your ISP and voice your concern in the hopes that they fight the decision and go the the Court of Cassation or the European Court.

Politicians may not be able to interfere with the courts but they CAN pass laws that override court decisions. Presumably the judge who ordered the ISPs to block these sites did so in reference to a particular Belgian law. The government can change that law so that it no longer allows these web sites to be blocked anymore.

Use a VPN.I already use one as I don't like my ISPs proxy and I don't like getting redirected to their search page whenever I enter a URL that doesn't resolve. I've setup my own VPN on a VPS so I know exactly what's getting logged (nothing), but at the same time I don't feel it gives me any extra privacy as the IP address can quite easily be linked to me (as I host my personal site on the same server), but if I was being paranoid and was up to something illegal it would be relatively easy to setup a VPS th

...to welcome Telecomix to the alt-root scene. OpenNIC [opennicproject.org] has been doing this for about a decade now. Let me let you guys in on a little secret: The less the "bad guys" know about you, the better. Meaning you shouldn't advertise yourselves as a solution to censorship, because you'll just get blocked at the IP level. Offer your services, and the censored masses will find you.

The bad guys read/. too, you know. Just the summaries, like all good/.ers.

If I was a government who wanted to keep a closer eye on the citizen's Internet traffic I might decide to start a fake corporation who offers "alternative" DNS service, then get people to switch to it by pissing them off. No more need for warrants etc, all the DNS traffic just goes straight through my own servers now.